“(…)” by James Tadd Adcox

(Clearly
one could take any story more or less at random and put it in
parentheses, in which case the parentheses would serve as decoration,
distraction, childishness, a ‘cheap trick.’ If there were a
basis for a story told in parenthesis, it would involve [naturally
enough] finding the connections between form and meaning. The first
question, then, would be: what is the meaning of the parenthesis?) (But:
the challenge of writing a story in parentheses is exactly that the
meaning of parentheses is so clear, so obvious—the default story for all
parentheses would be something like a series of secrets. And because how
one would use parentheses in such a hypothetical story is [or seems] so
obvious, that itself, the obviousness, becomes the challenge of said
[hypothetical] story [speaking, of course, of the challenge to the
writer; as for the challenge to the reader—well, should readers be
challenged? Or is it that the best stories are clear, easy to follow,
respectful of the reader’s busy schedule, of the fact that s/he, most
likely, is reading this on the train, in which case there are so many
distractions—yelling babies, yelling teenagers, yelling old men and
woman, cell phones going off, advertisements yelling from every wall and
even the windows, the conductor yelling out the side of the train for
people to hurry their boarding and deboarding—or else s/he, the reader,
is reading between appointments, in some small slice of his/er
increasingly smaller spare time: his/er mind liable to wander, anxieties
loitering like predatory hoodlums somewhere just off the page, waiting
to shoulder their way into consciousness as soon as his/er attention is
thrown by so much as a misplaced comma, much less all these parentheses…])
(The good version of said [hypothetical] story would need to be a story
in which the writer recognized the childishness, the obviousness of the
form, but, by recognizing it, went somewhere further with it.) (One
response, of course, would be the Barthian move, to write a story more
or less like the thing that I am writing now, a story in which the
conflict that is foregrounded is precisely the difficultly of the form,
the questions attached to the form, questions of why, for that matter,
one would take on such a form.) (‘Why not just a straight story?’ etc)
(Certainly this said [hypothetical] parentheses story is not the sort of
thing that I’ve been working on recently.) (If it were, there would be
the sudden introduction, right around here, of some sort of
outside knowledge, something that would attempt to break through the
prose, to, as it were, break through or simply break the story itself,
but which eventually becomes the prose, becomes the story.) (A
terrifying drone or the sound of a voice distorted through a
loudspeaker.) (Parentheses themselves are a fiction. They mark what is
supposedly not-there in a text, what is thought but not said. They are a
ghost within the text [a ghost being that which announces its own
absence]) (A story written in all parenthesis would therefore be a ghost
story.) (This is my third winter in Chicago. It’s not the cold that
bothers me, it’s the dark. Chicago in winter is the darkest city I’ve
ever lived in.) (Considering said [hypothetical] story: but what story
am I telling?) (The story perhaps of the simple effort to build things
in such a way that they last, to take the stuff that breaks so often,
the stuff whose natural state or essence is a
constant-breaking-downness—and by stuff here we may as well admit we
mean everything; to take this always-already-breaking stuff and put it
together into something that might last, of course this is a delusion,
but even if it lasts longer than the bare moment of its creation, it has
already outlasted what we have come to expect from life, each moment
dying at each moment, and gone.) (Or:) (Or else I am telling the story
of this winter in Chicago, where everyone keeps telling me that winter
has just begun.) (Each parenthesis must prompt itself, must in some
sense call itself into being.) (When I was younger I wanted to write
about myself, my heroes were Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, both
unquestionably authors designed—designed?—to appeal to a certain type of
young male readership, authors whose works conferred a sort of
masculinity on the, as it seemed to me, very unmasculine act of
reading.) (In the best version of this story, the original
conflict—between the writer and the form of the story itself—would give
way to something else, some other meaning would slip in, mirroring the
parenthesis itself, which slips in between the text, pointing to itself
as something by nature unnoticed, absent.) (scene: the Garfield Park
Conservatory, winter, almost evening. The dark comes early during
winter in Chicago—it is near the break in timezones, and so, in the
shortest days of winter, dark comes as soon as three-thirty. A man sits
on a bench in the “showhouse” section of the conservatory, typing on a
laptop. He is at an age where he is no longer sure whether to think of
himself as a “young man”—this phrase is the first thing he thinks of
when describing himself, but it is beginning to seem wrong. It is the
third winter he has lived in Chicago, and he takes some pride in his
ability to get through it, in the strategies he has learned. He is
pleased that he hasn’t yelled at anyone this winter, he hasn’t called
anyone in the middle of the night to alternately cry and make demands,
he hasn’t been drinking especially heavily, and so on. He goes to the
gym. He coats himself in SPF 65 sunblock and goes to the tanning salon,
because UV light is supposed to help. He goes to the conservatory, this
trip for example, so that he can walk around rooms filled with plants,
breathing in the moist plant-air. It occurs to him that all of his
strategies for dealing with the winter involve movement, involves the
verb “goes,” as if the danger, ultimately, is staying in any one place
too long.) (What does any story deal with other than death? Death
is the fundamental logic of the narrative form. Any narrative, then,
that focuses on the form of narrative itself is doubly concerned with
death.) (I have always looked for fathers in strange places.) (This is
why I disagree with the critique of metafiction, as a mode of writing,
being sterile, lifeless, “too clever,” etc. If metafiction were
simply writing concerned with writing, if it stopped there, then yes,
such work would be a[n occasionally charming] waste of time. But the
truth is that metafiction is always concerned, to one degree or another,
with death. The best metafictionists face death with more courage and
perspicuity than most any other writers that I can think of. Certainly I
have never seen a conventionally-realistic treatment of death that
seemed to get at the thing at all. You can describe a man or woman dying
in the most perfect detail and not even begin to face the thing
itself.) (It is not a thing.) (I am almost twenty-nine years old.)